writing

Every morning for the past four months has started the same way: me alone in my bed, typing my deepest traumas on a laptop—then starting work, hunched over another screen, feeling like a brick is sitting in my stomach.

Two screens mirroring tragedies: one from the past, and one that still rises every time I log in to work and realize I’m living a double life.

My life plays backward like a horror movie — blood on my hands, toes curling. I’ve seen this scene before. I try to warn the girl before she’s bludgeoned to death. Then I realize: the girl is me.

Before I started this book-writing process, I imagined myself typing in cute coffee shops. Sometimes that happens. More often, writing looks like the morning after a night of partying— only I have no fun stories of dancing on tabletops to explain my disheveled look. I stumble to the kitchen, make coffee, write in my pajamas, hair uncombed.

Writing and I are in a torturous love affair. We get it on, anywhere: five minutes between work projects, the gym parking lot, a supermarket aisle, if I’m feeling adventurous. Nothing about this life feels glamorous.

I am a woman on an island. Equal parts liberated and maddened.

But the beauty of this solitude is that without the noise, I’m slowly returning to myself. Once you’ve seen what you’ve survived and named the harm, you’re not so easily shaken. You will claw at anything that invades your path because this time, you see pain’s footprints coming.

You become the pretty monster.

This writing island is lonely. These past few months, I have cut off friends and ghosted dates who tried to overstep my boundaries.

Nice girls don’t survive here.

There was a time when I believed in a savior—Prince Charming, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny.

Soon, I learned Santa Claus was a story designed to control my behavior. If I were a “good little girl,” I would get the most presents. Prince Charming—the hero who rescues the helpless woman—was another fabricated tale, packaging love as salvation.

And still, some of us find comfort in the delusion.

At fifteen, my best friend met a man she believed was her Prince Charming. That illusion shattered the night he held a knife to her throat. I begged her to stay with my family a little longer. One evening, bleary-eyed, she told me she missed him. The next day, she went back as if magic were hidden in his back pocket.

I never heard from her again.

I spent nights afterward stewing in guilt because I could not save her. I told myself that if I had tried harder, shouted louder, loved her better, she would have stayed.

Four years later, I was the one shouting for help, pinned against a car in a parking lot while people stood nearby, silent, turning their heads. More than twenty years later, I still wake up screaming for that woman.

That was the first time I understood something every woman must eventually admit to herself: No one is coming to save me.

No Santa Claus.
No Easter Bunny.
And definitely, no Prince Charming.

So I wrote my way back to myself.

Writing gave me a place to unpack shame, to set down self-blame. I wrote about the things that hurt me, the things that made me angry. I found power in naming the tiny violences committed against me—even if it took decades to say it out loud.

Tag: writing

Womanhood Diaries, Vol. 8: Woman on an Island

Womanhood Diaries, Vol. 5: Prince Charming Carries a Knife